Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Ever since he’d dissolved our romance, that day hunting beside the creek, he’d stepped further away, until I couldn’t even grasp a figment of him. Magnolia pursed her lips, analyzed his stance. She recognized something was wrong but hadn’t discovered what it was.
Oak leaves crackled above, our farm indistinct in the valley below. Lark pushed off the mossycup trunk, swung his rifle over his shoulder. “Told my pa I’d help dry venison today.”
Another lie. Our fathers repaired the fences down in the holler today.
But good riddance, I wanted him to go. Lark muttered some joke, cloaking the awkwardness between us, his ease frighteningly believable—but he wouldn’t look into my eyes.
I’d had one portrait of Lark the stretch of our childhood—but I’d been wrong.
He walked over, leaned down, and kissed Magnolia.
Lark stood, and she smiled up at him, fiddling with the lilac ribbons of her sunbonnet.
And then he was off down the path, his stride lanky, haphazard as the forest swallowed him whole.
A white-tailed hawk squawked faroff, beyond the crackle of brittle oak leaves.
“We’ll visit,” Magnolia said, her gauzy white overblouse opalescent in the sunglow.
“You’re my sister, my dearest friend—I won’t have you living without me. ”
I rested the mottled red apple in my lap, against the pleats of my skirt, the fabric sunny yellow daisies.
But I didn’t believe platitudes anymore.
I couldn’t envision how we could live alongside each other much longer.
Magnolia bit her lip, ran a thumb across the tines of a fork, and I gathered the floral plates, slipped them back in our basket.
“I’ve noted, since our engagement, you and Lark haven’t ventured off alone.
” She hesitated, splotches of rose streaking up her throat.
“I reason that’s an above-reproach notion. ”
I folded a gingham napkin, and a cloud passed overhead, muting the glossy light.
I felt vacant, all the way inside. She was the cleverest of us, but somehow she hadn’t put the pieces together about Lark and me.
I couldn’t tell her, not with her this happy, not with him choosing her.
The past didn’t matter, not even in the slightest. It was past. It’d stay there.
I’d let her write her own version of our childhood.
“Sure.” I rubbed my clavicle, the ridge of my skin chapped. “No reason for us to go off alone anyhow.”
Magnolia held her embroidered ivory cape tight at her neck and studied me, apprehension rippling under her poise.
A yellow jacket buzzed by, darting toward the stream.
She sensed my evasion but chose to believe me, a smile budding across her face.
My sister, the person who knew me best, didn’t see me.
And I broke—she’d never even asked whether I loved him.
Just one evening she’d come racing into our home, startling everyone clustered before the woodfire, and announced they were engaged.
She’d vaulted into my arms, giddy and blissful, and I’d held her, shocked.
I hadn’t been angry then, the disloyalty sharp and debilitating—but as the days sped past, I smoldered.
She wasn’t that clueless, was she? I waffled between rage and sorrow, capsized by the carelessness of the betrayal. How could she not even ask?
Out in the grove, I plopped an enamelware plate into the basket, the clang unnatural in the wood.
Magnolia glanced up, a furrow between her brows.
I dropped another plate, the whimsical cornflowers and cobalt forget-me-nots shivering as the plate steadied.
She opened her mouth, and I cut her off. “He’s lying, you know.”
Her lips pinched, a familiar expression of disappointment, the one when she thought my behavior was lacking decorum or moderation.
She deliberately straightened the plates, morning luminescence like dew along her cheekbones.
“I presumed we wouldn’t have to discuss this,” she said, her fingers resting on the sapphire rim of the plate.
She looked up, her expression closer to pity than I thought necessary. “But we do, don’t we?”
I picked up the apple core, gestured for her to continue. She rested her clenched hands in her lap. “Can’t you just be happy for me? For once, let me step out from your shadow.”
I coughed a stunned laugh. “You cannot be serious,” I said. “How about: I apologize for stealing your beau.”
Magnolia dropped a trio of forks, her eyes wide. It seemed she truly hadn’t known Lark and I had been together. Varying emotions flickered over her face before something rigid settled, as if she were holding on to her shape. “He chose me.”
I stood, tossed the apple into the basket. “And you betrayed me.”
“Betrayed?” She wiped her hands along her waistband, stood. She shook her head, voice rising in pitch, lines fraught across her forehead. “Now just hold on a minute. Of all the things you could say to me—”
“And you’re not even homesteading!” I screamed, everything inside me overflowing, an eruption.
Her posture motionless as she migrated a cascade of thoughts, seemingly understanding all that had been hidden.
Then, within the breadth of a blink, the moment passed.
I wondered whether I’d actually glimpsed her disarray or imagined it entirely.
She stepped backward, straightened the draping of her bodice, as if putting herself away, as if she must, furiously, clutch onto control.
“Homesteading was a childhood fantasy,” she said. “By God above, you must become less histrionic.”
But it hadn’t been a fantasy, not for me. All our years planning had felt like a promise. Underneath it all, that was the crux of my heartbreak. My dreams—lost. My belief in others, shattered.
“You’ve been moody and ill tempered for weeks,” she continued, “since we announced our engagement.” Her expression static, her ivory skin now shaded ghost white. “Can’t you just move on, stop throwing this tantrum?” She gestured at me, at my heartbreak, like I was some overreacting toddler.
I didn’t recognize this woman who’d replaced my kind, demure sister.
When losing an argument, when afraid or defensive, Magnolia often lashed out with a small swipe, an underhand insult or a petty observation.
But she’d never responded like this. I supposed, after losing her parents and home as a young child, she couldn’t allow life to slip through her fingers, forever afraid of losing safe harbor.
A squirrel clattered up the loblolly pine, the noises of the forest rising as dawn slipped away from the day.
She adjusted her stance, and a greenbrier thorn caught on her cloak.
She looked over her shoulder, unwound it from the white wool.
Tranquil and unruffled, as if she wouldn’t allow herself to recognize that everything between us had gone to ruin.
“You’re clasping onto him,” I said, “just as you’ve always clasped onto me.
Do you even love him?” I gripped the yellow daisies at my shoulders, palms sticky with apple sap.
“I’m leaving, and you’ve never been brave enough to do anything by yourself.
Because you can’t imagine living any way but boring, predictable, safe. ”
Dirt from the forest floor smudged the tiny bluebells embroidered on her hem. She bent and picked up her basket, her once-fragile profile hardened. She’d broken and re-formed into something stronger.
“You’ve never had any restraint. I wonder why I thought anything would change,” she said. “Just make it through our wedding day without embarrassing me.”
And then she turned and walked through the copse, shoulders tight, her ivory cape rippling behind her.
The air scented tart and coarse, of winesap apples and faraway woodsmoke.
The memory unraveled, and I was once again in Oklahoma Territory.
Moisture from my flask seeped through my sleeve, the bitter scent of applejack, the woodland timberline faraway, as if the forest wasn’t actually there.
Stot stared at the sky, jaw loosened, as if he readied to speak.
But unlike the other men I’d run across, he wouldn’t fill silence with platitudes.
A norther whooshed, freezing the heat along my arms.
He adjusted his legs, something like a wince carved beside his eyes. He scratched parallel lines down his neck. “It’s dreadful to fancy someone you can’t have.”
My stomach dropped out below me. I picked at some wild rye stuck to the needlepoint on my bodice. “It is.”
He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar. I studied the prairie’s many shades of black, like different weights of charcoal pigment pressed across the landscape.
“So you fixing to tell the marshal about the bodies or not?” he asked.
“Are you kidding me? No questions, comments,” I said. “Do you ever react to anything?”
“React?”
“Are you aghast?” I asked. He poured some whiskey in my decanter and handed it to me. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Your past is my business none,” he said. “Unless you’re itching to tell me more.”
“Assuredly not.”
He leaned over his lap toward me, wickedness edging his mouth. “Course you do.”
“I won’t give excuses, explain it away. It was appalling.”
“So’s everyone’s past.”
Was that it, then? Was he remaking himself as well?
“Yours?” I asked.
He thumbed his pocket watch, the ivory dial uncanny in the surrounding atmosphere of grays and browns. “You watch others fear me, you know my reputation: Of course my past is full of depravity.”
“I confessed my betrayal of the person I love most,” I said. “What’s all this treachery you’re lugging about?”
He gazed at the silhouette of the woodland, beyond my land, into time and distance. The hollows deepened beneath his cheekbones, his hat in repose on the grass, dull black crown pointing away. He glanced back—I held his gaze, dew crisp in the air.
“I killed my wife.”